The “great MAGENTA cover’d opusculus” (as Ezra Pound described it) is 100 years old today. See the full journal here.

[themify_quote] Blast 1 was edited and largely written by Wyndham Lewis with contributions from Pound, Gaudier-Brzeska, Epstein, Spencer Gore, Wadsworth, and Rebecca West and included an extract from Ford Madox Hueffer’s novel The Saddest Story, better known by its later title The Good Soldier (published under his subsequent pseudonym, Ford Madox Ford). The first edition was printed in folio format, with the oblique title Blast splashed across its bright pink soft cover. Inside, Lewis used a range of bold typographic innovations and tricks to engage the reader, that are reminiscent of Marinetti’s contemporary concrete poetry such as Zang Tumb Tumb. The opening twenty pages of Blast 1 contain the Vorticist manifesto, written by Lewis with assistance from Pound and signed by Lewis, Wadsworth, Pound, William Roberts, Helen Saunders, Lawrence Atkinson, Jessica Dismorr, and Gaudier-Brzeska. Epstein chose not to sign the manifesto, although his work was featured. – Wikipedia [/themify_quote]

Read the manifesto from BLAST 1 – ‘Long Live the Vortex!’ here.

You might also want to check out BLAST-UP! – the computer game/poem/tribute to Vorticism conceived by Katy Price and programmed by me for the 2009 Festival of Ideas in Cambridge, UK. BLAST-UP! is loaded with vocabulary drawn from sources in British mass culture such as Heat Magazine and the Daily Mirror: the player fires at these invading words as they swarm across the screen, accumulating a list of ‘Blessed’ and ‘Blasted’ terms to create a manifesto in the style of BLAST.

Also have a look at this lovely tribute issue of Redactions: Poetry & Poetics for sale on Etsy.